Page 96 of Angel in Absentia
The blade sank to the bottom of the pool as her hands clawed at his back. Her weapon and her salvation could not kill him, and so instead she died in his arms, time and time again.
Chapter 29
City of the Soul
HE NEXT MORNING, Clea awoke as an alien to herself and her own body. She didn’t recognize her hands, hands that had explored and searched and savored. She didn’t recognize her arms that had welcomed, her hips that had invited, her chest, her legs, her skin that had offered and yearned and clasped and begged so pitifully at every sensation.
Lying under the morning light, her body was cast out on the comfort of a blanket, embraced in the shell of another who was also alien to her. Every memory of the night before was foreign, and she wanted to crawl away from his arms, fish her dress from the water, and somehow repair the irreparable tear that split it open, beyond any return to its former shape. She was that dress.
She was a stranger to the creature she had become the night before, a creature without restraint or dignity. Hungry and pleading, it had begged and thrashed in the water. By the time the water had cooled, they were on the stone, the carpeted path, open in the air, and he was no longer tender or gentle. Their bodies argued against the ground in clashes of violence and worship. By the time they’d managed to reach the bed, she’d suffered under his teaching and was eager to repay both folly and pleasure.
There had been such dreadful urges to both heal and punish, confusingly interlaced and exchanged when at moments he was the healer, and she killed for him in exchange, offering pain forpleasure as she scratched clean lines across his back and bit and clawed into him like an animal. There was nothing he didn’t return in kind.
Watching her hand laid out against the morning light, she prayed the light had released her back to herself, that the night had been her penance paid for failure, and that after today, all could be forgotten. The moment she was convinced of such freedom, she felt his hands move again over her, calling like they had so many times before. In seconds, none of it was alien anymore, his touch least of all, and she turned in his arms, kissing and asking and giving, speaking a language without words, a language so powerful that the exchange made all but raw cries seem mute and useless by comparison.
Between every reawakening of such a wordless monster, she’d return to that lonely island of self that felt smaller and more distant with each repetition of nameless acts that arrested her in all of their mystery and power.
She was cursed. That thought lingered as she looked into his eyes, eyes that were black in the morning light, hiding the fierceness of his nature. Cradled in his arms, his warmth felt like a story with a dark and inescapable ending.
“You’ve turned me into a monster,” she confessed, and as she expected, he could only offer a pleased smile, pleased as he so was by devastation. She felt like a battlefield, boiling with smoke and broken weaponry.
“Even I am incapable of that,” he whispered back.
She stared honestly into his eyes, wondering if he meant it.
“Your eyes look warm,” she said, stroking his face. “I suppose I only see it because now I must love the darkness as much as you do.”
He laughed once, and she startled at the movement in his chest, and then he laughed again, burying his face in her neck as he stroked her hair. “Princess,” he chuckled, pulling away from her, his smile full. “You’re acting so dismal.”
She braced her hands on his chest. “I am dismal,” she said, “I am dismal. I—” She searched the space between them for the words. “I was supposed to kill you. I’m—”
“An awful assassin,” he said and then pulled her close, wrapping himself around her, entangling them deeper. “Or perhaps the best one.” He started to kiss her neck and then her chest.
She slid away from him with such haste that she stumbled out of the bed, taking a blanket with her from the adjacent bed. She raked it up around her body, watching him wide-eyed before she ran to the pool and pulled her soaking dress from it. She dove and fished out her blade, wrapping herself in the cold, soaking dress as she gripped the knife close to her.
Ryson watched all of this unfold from the comfort of the blanket until she stood in front of him, trembling in her soaked dress, the blade still clutched near her. Neither of them spoke.
Clea wasn’t sure what she was doing, until she noticed the full implications of the light, and said, “It will be a stretch to tell them that healing you took this long. Is this my punishment? What is my punishment? What will you do? You’re plotting something. You must be.”
He raised an eyebrow. “I feel like I’ve punished you plenty.”
“I’m serious,” she barked back.
They sat there for a long moment, and at last, he said, “You were right.”
“Was right?” she asked.
“To try,” he replied. “If you’d consented to simply going off into the woods, your conversion into an Insednian would have been your ultimate destruction, and you would have consented, had you not resolved to kill me instead. I wanted you free of the obligations of your people. You wanted that too. It seems you were right to make the choice you did. I see now why it was the right one. Now, your clothes.” He lifted his voice and called, “Prince.”
Clea nearly threw the knife, diving back toward the blanket and throwing herself into it before Prince materialized.
“Can you fetch the princess an identical robe?” Ryson asked.
I see the healing went well. Hello, Princess.
“Quite,” Ryson said with a laugh. Clea felt it with her body where she hid beneath the covers.
A vulnerable, natural thing. I’m surprised you don’t cover it.
